John Clarke, born in the United Kingdom and currently a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), led experiments in an electric circuit that exhibited quantum tunnelling and discrete energy levels.
Michel Devoret, a French physicist and professor at Yale University and University of California, Santa Barbara, joined Clarke’s work by pushing circuits to the edge: he helped show that even relatively large superconducting devices can behave like quantum systems.
John Martinis, an American physicist affiliated with University of California, Santa Barbara, also contributed key experimental work demonstrating macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in circuits.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited their collective achievement as the “discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”
Their work helps bridge the gap between quantum mechanics’ strange microscopic world and practical devices. It opens avenues for more stable superconducting qubits, quantum sensors, and quantum computing technologies.
As of 2025, Nobel Prize marks a significant milestone, showing that quantum phenomena cannot just live in atoms or particles, they can emerge in circuits you can touch.